Fracturing is a performance enhancing technique where fractures are started in a variety of ways and in some cases further propagated and/or held open for ultimate production to the surface. Packers have been set in open hole as a technique to initiate fractures as described in US Publication 2011/0139456. However, this technique preferably used compression set packers and sliding sleeves 22 that were located uphole from each packer that could be selectively opened for production. Another design shown in US Publication 2011/0284229 showed a series of inflatable packers that incorporated sliding sleeves that were shifted with a shifting tool on a service string such as coiled tubing to open ports above the inflatable which fully encircled the production string. This design involved another trip in the hole to open the ports and positioning of the ports remotely from the packer since the inflatable fully surrounded the production string.
Other references with some relevance to the present invention include U.S. Pat. No. 2,798,560 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,655,286.
What is needed and offered by the present invention is a way to initiate the fractures while at the same time minimizing the distance between the frac port and the fracture initiation device. The inflatables envisioned for the present invention preferably are segmental leaving gaps in between so that the ports can be located between the preferably inflated segments that initiate propagation of the fractures. The use of such segments or lobes to initiate fracture also leaves gaps so that a cementing job can take place with the cement fully filling the annular space by flowing around the lobes. The frac ports are hydraulically operated so that an intervention string is not needed. Various sensors can be employed to transmit formation information to the surface to determine the onset of fractures. The fractures can occur through the ports opened by the sliding sleeves either in open hole without cementing or through the cement. Multiple stacks of lobes can be used with sleeve actuation devices that employ balls of progressively larger size as one way to actuate the sleeves in the order required. These and other features of the present invention will be more readily apparent to those skilled in the art from a review of the detailed description of the preferred embodiment and the associated drawings while recognizing that the full scope of the invention is to be found in the appended claims.